An Innovative Approach for Detection of Armoured Vehicle in Airborne Thermal Imagery Using Morphological Processing and Texture Feature Extraction

Automatic detection of a vehicle in an airborne thermal imagery is a challenging research topic in computer vision, especially the detection of military tanks in the field. Various methodologies for detection in forward-looking infrared imagery, which has higher spatial resolution, has been discussed by a number of researchers in literature. The algorithm we developed in the present study detects tanks not only in higher resolution but in lower resolution imagery as well. Detection algorithm is initiated by the segmentation of thermal image using mean shift, which provides possible targets present in the field other than the background. To reduce clutter and uneven illumination in a thermal image, a pre-processing morphological algorithm based on top-hat filtering has been implemented. After convolution of image window with Gabor filter banks, we extracted the energy feature of each image generated after convolution. The energy vector of such a target and the neighbouring background window has been calculated, and the similarity between the target and background using distance-measuring method has been measured. The minimum distance is used as the threshold to decide the target. A comparative study has been carried out between tanks and various targets/objects that appear similar to tanks in a thermal image. This validates our target detection algorithm. The false-positive rate and true-positive rate have been calculated for performance evaluation. Overall, this algorithm shows promising results for tank detection using single-band thermal imagery